Earlier this summer, when FBI Director James Comey made his case for backdooring strong encryption, he told us that he wanted to hash out the policy considerations surrounding encryption, law enforcement, and security in public: “Democracies resolve such tensions through robust debate.” This week, we learned that Comey apparently actually meant that he wanted the debate resolved in secret, before a judge known only to the government, by way of a sealed wiretap order.

As we say goodbye to another summer of computer security conferences, we would like to take a moment to extend our thanks to the countless people who helped bolster civil liberties defense this year in Las Vegas. Organizers and attendees at Security BSides Las Vegas, Black Hat USA, DEF CON, and the kid-focused r00tz Asylum are all part of the ever-growing movement to defend digital freedom. As "hacking" loses some of its stigma, it serves us well to remember that at its core, hacking is about curiosity, problem-solving, and innovation. These key principles help ensure that technology can work in our favor and remains in our control.

The maintainer of GoAgent, one of China's more popular censorship circumvention tools emptied out the project's main source code repositories on Tuesday. Phus Lu, the developer, renamed the repository’s description to “Everything that has a beginning has an end”. Phus Lu’s Twitter account's historywas also deleted, except for a single tweet that linked to a Chinese translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not By Lies”. That essay was originally published in 1974 on the day of the Russian dissident’s arrest for treason.

Readers of these pages will be familiar with the debate going on between government officials and technologists around the world about law enforcement’s perceived need to access the content of any and all encrypted communications.1

This summer EFF unveiled the sixth limited edition member's t-shirt for the 23rd annual DEF CON, the premier world hacker conference in Las Vegas. This year’s design, like the shirts we produced in 2013 and 2014, includes a puzzle that involves the use of encryption.

The front of this year’s shirt features a long cipher text, displayed in a 1940s typeface: